If Page A has multiple links to Page B, does that show any more weight than a single link? Is Page A's PR spread thinner to every page it links to? Does Page B receive any more PR than it would have with only one link? Thanks!

hi everyone,
Having one link is sufficient as having more links to the same page does not give the page more pr but it also depends what are the links are about. If you have a thesis with many sections then addind links to those sections is ok but does not create any form of pr but more of a form of accesibility. But other tah that one link should suffice.

Yours Sincerely

Richard West

Simple answer is no. Google once published a formula that they used to calculate PR. It's probably not used any more but consensus is that it's not a bad starting point. Here 'tis:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Where PR(A) is the PageRank of Page A (the one we want to work out).

D is a dampening factor. Nominally this is set to 0.85

PR(T1) is the PageRank of a site pointing to Page A

C(T1) is the number of links off that page

PR(Tn)/C(Tn) means we do that for each page pointing to Page A

Yikes! So for those of you that aren't mathematicians, heres the low-down on that formula – you cant simply calculate PageRank in one go like that. To calculate the PageRank of Page A you'd need to know the PageRank of all the pages pointing to Page A. Their PageRanks would in part be due to Page A pointing to them or some other site that points to them! What a silly formula. What it does tell us is one very important thing about the PageRank of any page…

So by having 8 links form one page to another is the same net result as having one. BUT.....if you have a link to one other page as well as the 8 to the other, then the page with one link only only gets 1/9th the weight as if you had only 1 link to the other page when it would get hald the weight.

In short, if you are using different anchor text in the link, then it is actually a good idea, if you are targeting that anchor text as part of your keywords.

PR itself - wet raspberry to that. If you find you need to use multiple links to the same page then use them, but if you can, then vary the anchor text, so that the page being linked to is given additional weight for ranking for those additional keywords.

Ok, cool, thanks Brian. If you scroll up and look in the navigation bar of this page, you'll see that a link to the Search Engines/SEO forum appears in the breadcrumb in addition to as a big link. Since it's like this on every forum thread, I figured all those extra duplicate links would add up, especially so early in the page.

I don't believe I've ever seen the weighting of links publicly tested on this - but I've always taken it as given that if you have 10 links on Page A, and 5 links are to Page B, then PAge B would have 50% of Page A's PageRank benefit. I know the algo is a lot more complicated than that, but as an approximation I don;t believe I've seen anything to particularly contest it. I've certainly noted that if you use different anchor text to the same URL from one page, then the anchor text variations are both counted for the purposes of ranking the targeted URL.

Waffle aside, the repeated links shouldn't be a bad thing.

I have tried to improve the ranking of one of my pages by adding a single word anchor text link to some 50 pages of my site. It did not work too well. Lately I selected the pages most on topic for this keyword and added second word to the anchor text, different second word for every link. There was a major increase in the target page ranking for the keyword.

I do not know if this is incidental. These links were at the bottom of the page, thus perhaps I have just broken some filter. Such filter may give less weight to multiple links with identical anchor text, specifically when the links are placed in suspected positions.